South Koreans Flex Smartphone Muscles

First time on Seoul’s subway system? Don’t expect a lot of eye contact. Here, almost everyone is busy playing games like Cookie Run, or sending messages on their oversized smartphones.

Those eyeballs add up. In 2013, South Korea jumped ahead of the U.S. in revenue generated from app sales on Google Inc.’s Play mobile store, according to research and analysis firm App Annie, which tracks app purchases. That makes South Korea, a country of 50 million people, the second-most lucrative country in the world by that metric, just behind Japan.

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